Real-Life Florida Horror Stories To Scare You This Halloween

Halloween in Florida can feel redundant since living in the Sunshine State is often inherently a horror story. All future slasher and disaster flicks should be filmed here. For one, the people are usually coated in sweat and tears (no makeup artists required), and the fauna includes sharks, alligators, and snakes (no animatronic creatures needed either). Florida has also been a bonanza for some of the world's most terrifying serial killers: Danny Rolling, Ted Bundy, and Aileen Wuornos all murdered here. The final nail in the proverbial coffin: The peninsula even looks like a gun shooting little island bullets. Though it's almost impossible to narrow down the strangest and scariest stories to come out of South Florida, we've given it our best shot. Here are the top six:

Key West's Corpse Bride (fictional equivalent: Psycho):
Carl Tanzler was an x-ray technician in Key West who frequently had visions of a dark-haired beauty. He became fixated on a local girl named Helen, who was a tuberculosis patient at the hospital where he worked. Tanzler was desperate to cure the object of his affections, but she died at the age of 22. Helen's body was laid to rest in a mausoleum commissioned by her former suitor, but it didn't remain there. Visiting Key West Cemetery every night eventually failed to satisfy Tanzler, who dug up the corpse and loaded it into a toy wagon that he pulled to his home. He fashioned his corpse bride into a doll made from wire coat hangers, wax, plaster of Paris, and a hunk of her hair. He slept with the body in his bed for almost a dec­ade before getting nabbed by the cops in 1940.

via Herald Video

Miami Zombie (see: Night of the Living Dead):
This is probably the scariest thing that has happened in the history of the world. In May 2012, Rudy Eugene approached Ronald Poppo near the MacArthur Causeway and complained about not being able to "score on the beach." He then accused the homeless Poppo of stealing his Bible before stripping naked and eating off 80 percent of the man's face. The attack was so disturbing that the CDC felt compelled to tell the public that a zombie apocalypse was not at hand and that there was no known virus that could reanimate the dead.